Motor tours in Yorkshire

by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

Here, for instance, is Oswaldkirk, which might well tempt us to pause. It is scattered along the side of a hill, with its little houses half smothered in trees. The tiny church is open, and in it are some fragments of Saxon and Norman work, and a Jacobean pulpit which once held the famous John Tillotson, who began life in a tailor's shop and ended it as Archbishop of Canterbury. His success was chiefly due, I believe, to his eloquence, so we may regard this spot as the cradle of his fortunes, since the sermon he preached here was his first. And here in Oswaldkirk was born another man of mark, the antiquarian to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the ruined monasteries, Roger Dodsworth. He collaborated with Dugdale in the "Monasticon," which was not published till after his death. The younger man inherited the fruit of his researches, and has more or less eclipsed his name.

A little more than a mile beyond Oswaldkirk is Gilling, one of the prettiest villages in the county. Its wide street is bordered by bright gardens; a tiny stream runs through it under a row of miniature bridges; on the left is a church with some interesting tombs; and on the right, entirely hidden by the trees, is the castle of the Fairfaxes. Only those who have secured special permission are admitted to see this castle and its splendid Elizabethan Hall, of which the fame has reached many who were never in it. It is, according to all accounts, a marvel of rich ornament, of oaken panels and delicate inlay, of carved mouldings and stained glass and armorial shields.

A road with a perfect surface carries us out of the village to the top of a hill—where one patch of heather by the wayside reminds us that we are on Grimston Moor—and on through Brandsby to Stillington. The church we leave behind us as we turn sharply to the left has no special interest beyond the fact that Laurence Sterne preached many of his sermons in it, while he was living at Sutton-in-the-Forest and at Coxwold. Here in Stillington we leave the fine high-road for a very poor one—one that is a mere lane in fact—which leads us past the strange little church of Marton-on-the-Forest, with its crow-stepped gables and tower, to the village of Sheriff Hutton.

"What is this forest call'd?" we may be inclined to ask with Archbishop Scrope in "Henry IV." "'Tis Gaultree Forest, an't shall please your grace." Even in Leland's time there was very little wood in the neighbourhood of Sheriff Hutton, and now the Forest of Galtres, so "impenetrable and swampy" when the Romans set to work to drain it, has practically vanished. A good proportion of it, I think, must always have been forest only in the technical sense, for we hear of it in the reign of Elizabeth as the scene of a yearly horse-race, wherein the prize for the winning horse was a little golden bell. Moreover, there is a tradition that wanderers in the Forest of Galtres, which reached to the outskirts of York, were guided by a light hung in the lantern tower of All Saints Church. Unless a great part of the country were open—"low medows and morisch ground"—this light would not have greatly aided the belated traveller. Be that as it may, the country is now so open that as we draw near Sheriff Hutton we may see with a thrill, if we look very intently along the far horizon, the faint, elusive gleaming of York Minster.

The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more impressive at a distance than close at hand. It is visible miles away across the flat country, and the jagged outlines of its cluster of towers stand up so imposingly against the sky that one is led to expect something rather vast and effective. But these gaunt remnants are all there is to see. They stand in a farmyard and are surrounded with haystacks. Once upon a time this castle was fine enough. It had eight or nine great towers, "and the stately staire up to the haul" was very magnificent, and so was "the haul it self, and al the residew of the house." It owed its splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to the great Warwick among others, who seems always to have lived in a state of kingly magnificence, as befitted one who made kings. When he died it passed, with his other castles, to his son-in-law Richard III., who used it as a prison for such claimants of the throne as he did not trouble to murder. There was humour in this plan of sending the two young cousins to keep each other company—Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and the youthful Warwick, son of that Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of Malmsey. They were not here very long, for hardly had their Uncle Richard's ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn on Bosworth Field, before the new king's emissary was riding in all haste to Sheriff Hutton. There was a crowd that day about this gate that still bears the arms of the Nevilles and of England, for from all the country round the people gathered to do honour to their future queen; and as she was led out from her prison to share Henry's throne, the gentry of the neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed forward to escort her to London. Poor cousin Warwick went to London too, with a bodyguard of a sterner sort; for since his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be merged in those of the new king, he was destined for the Tower and the block.

There is no record, apparently, of how this stately castle was transformed in the course of one century from a "Princely Logginges" to a mere shell. The usual death sentence of castles, "dismantled by order of the Parliament," was never pronounced in this case, for the mischief was done before Charles I. was king. In Henry VIII.'s reign this was for a time the home of that Duke of Norfolk who was the uncle of two queens, and lived to see them both upon the scaffold. He was a witness at Anne Boleyn's wedding and a judge at her trial, and was himself only saved from the block by Henry's death. His son Surrey, the sweet singer, has walked here too, where now the hay is stacked.

SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE.

Richard III. was here at least once, in the year before his death. He and his sad wife—sad all her life, but now heart-broken—came here to bury their little son. At the end of the sloping village street is the old church where they laid him; and there we may still see, not the place of his burial, for that is unknown, but the little alabaster figure that once lay upon his tomb. It has the air of being a good portrait. The features are still faintly visible; the pathetic down-drawn mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son was not much happier than herself. Circling the boyish head is a heavy crown, the only crown it ever wore. The reason that the Prince of Wales was buried here does not appear. Some suggest that his mother, who was with Richard at Nottingham, could not bear to return to Middleham, and so met the funeral procession here; but there is at least one historian[6] who describes her despair when she saw her dead son in his own home. Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff Hutton when her little cousin Edward was brought here to his grave. She must have remembered another Edward, nearer and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet discovered, had been so lately made at the foot of the dark staircase in the Tower of London.